AC_INIT mangling of PACKAGE_TARNAME

[Roger Leigh]

Following recent discussion of using non-static version numbers in
AC_INIT or removing the AC_INIT arguments completely in favour of a
more dynamic mechanism, I've switched on of my projects to do this:

(sbuild_m4_chomp and sbuild_m4_esyscmd_s are taken from Eric Blake's
patch for autoconf 2.64 (I'm using 2.63 so needed to include the
missing code.)

dnl m4 magic from Eric Blake <address@hidden>, prior to automake inclusion
m4_define([sbuild_m4_chomp],
[m4_format([[%.*s]], m4_bregexp(m4_translit([$1], [
]]m4_dquote(_m4_defn([m4_cr_all]))[, [/]]m4_format([%255s], [])[),
  [/*$]), [$1])])
m4_define([sbuild_m4_esyscmd_s],
[sbuild_m4_chomp(m4_esyscmd([$1]))])
AC_PREREQ(2.59)
dnl Quoting the first argument results in a bizarrely corrupted package tarname
AC_INIT(sbuild_m4_esyscmd_s([sed -ne 
'/^Package:/{s/Package:[[:space:]][[:space:]]*//p;q}' VERSION]),
        [sbuild_m4_esyscmd_s([sed -ne 
'/^Version:/{s/Version:[[:space:]][[:space:]]*//p;q}' VERSION])],
        [sbuild_m4_esyscmd_s([sed -ne 
'/^Maintained-By:/{s/Maintained-By:[[:space:]][[:space:]]*//p;q}' VERSION])])

The VERSION file contains (generated from git release tag name and metadata):
Package: sbuild
Version: 0.58.3
Release-Date: 17 May 2009
Released-By: Roger Leigh <address@hidden>
Git-Tag: sbuild-0.58.3

This results in the following in configure:

# Identity of this package.
PACKAGE_NAME='sbuild'
PACKAGE_TARNAME='sbuild'
PACKAGE_VERSION='0.58.3'
PACKAGE_STRING='sbuild 0.58.3'
PACKAGE_BUGREPORT='address@hidden'

However, if I was to correctly quote the first argument to AC_INIT:
AC_INIT([sbuild_m4_esyscmd_s([sed -ne 
'/^Package:/{s/Package:[[:space:]][[:space:]]*//p;q}' VERSION])],
        [sbuild_m4_esyscmd_s([sed -ne 
'/^Version:/{s/Version:[[:space:]][[:space:]]*//p;q}' VERSION])],
        [sbuild_m4_esyscmd_s([sed -ne 
'/^Maintained-By:/{s/Maintained-By:[[:space:]][[:space:]]*//p;q}' VERSION])])

I get this:

# Identity of this package.
PACKAGE_NAME='sbuild'
PACKAGE_TARNAME='--sed--ne----package---s-package----space------space------p-q---version--'
PACKAGE_VERSION='0.58.3'
PACKAGE_STRING='sbuild 0.58.3'
PACKAGE_BUGREPORT=''

While the package name is correct, the tarname is transliterated junk
and the bug reporting address is empty.  The version is correct.

I can't understand why PACKAGE_TARNAME is being handled in some special
manner which results in this mess rather than just using the expanded
form as for PACKAGE_NAME.  What is the reason for this, and if it's
buggy please could it be fixed?


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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